CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (16 page)

"In here," the Mexican said, leading her by the hand through the goats and children, through a printed cotton curtain into what appeared to be a kitchen of sorts. There was a brick oven in an outside wall, wooden counters along two other walls, pots and pans hanging from the rafters, a huge pottery bowl of flour. The smell of grease and cooked food drowned the scent of the goats from the other room. Next to a big water barrel with a tin dipper hanging from the side stood an old stool and on it sat an ancient black dial phone, the kind Molly had seen only at antique markets. The telephone wire also went up to the open rafters, was looped on hooks across the room to the open window. It evidently hooked up directly to a pole outdoors.

"Amazing," Molly said.

"It is, is it not?" the Mexican said, his bare, hairless chest puffed with pride. "Not everyone can have a telephone." He took the receiver, listened for the dial tone, then smiled and handed it over. "It works. It always works unless we get a lot of rain."

"Wonderful."

"This will be collect, si?"

"Oh, yes, it'll be collect. Thank you. Thank you so much." She took the phone, waited for him to return to the front sleeping room. When he did not, she shrugged, and dialed the operator. It took several minutes to explain to the operator that she wanted to make a collect call to the United States, to Flor-re-da, and to give her the number. The Mexican watched, his face beaming, his smile flaring his cheeks so that the sideburns stood out on his face like the ties on a woman's bonnet.

Finally Molly heard the phone ringing on the other end of the line. The connection had gone through. It continued ringing. Ringing.
"C'mon, Daddy,"
she whispered.
"Answer the phone."

After an interminable time the long-distance operator came on the line and said the party was not answering. Molly almost said she knew that, she could hear, for God's sake.

When she replaced the receiver in its cradle she was near tears. She wondered what time it was in Florida. Maybe her father was out for a while. If he'd been sleeping, the ringing would have wakened him.

"Bad news?" the Mexican asked.

"I got through, but no one answered." She was almost in tears. The man looked saddened by that fact along with her.

There was a racket in the sleeping room. Goats stomping and bleating again, children speaking unintelligible Spanish. Someone called a name and the man pushed back the curtain. Rather than enter the room, however, he stayed where he was, blocking Molly's way. She had meant to follow him. Maybe she could get him to help her. Since he spoke English and was so kind, maybe he could find her a way back to Texas before Cruise woke up at sundown.

Suddenly the man turned and took her arm. He led her forward through the curtain. She didn't think to resist.

"What is it?" she asked, confused.

Cruise stood towering over the assembled Mexican family. His shoulders kept the sunlight from entering through the front door. He stood silently, his gaze never leaving her. Goats pressed against his legs and nibbled at the cuffs of his slacks. The children were at their mother's side, unmoving.

Molly's heart sank. She tried to pull free of the Mexican. "Let me go!" She might leap out the window in the kitchen.

"I didn't know she was your girl, Senor Cruise. She asked to use the phone. I could not say no."

"Come with me, Molly."

"I don't want to go with you. I want to stay here."

He smiled at that. He looked at the Mexican. "She wants to stay here."

"Oh, no, oh, no, she cannot do that!" The Mexican faced her. His hair had gone wild in disarray from the shaking he was doing to his head. The pompadour was coming apart. "You can't stay here. you must go with Senor Cruise."

It was impossible. She hadn't any way out. She hadn't even made it to the edge of town. He must have followed her since she left the hotel. It was his footfalls she had heard behind her.

"You can't stay here, Molly," Cruise said. He crossed the space between them and took her hand. The Mexican held out her arm as if it were a gift, as if to say,
Take her, take her and all the trouble that comes with her.

Molly was jerked out of the small house and into blinding sunshine. She squinted her eyes, tried to keep up with Cruise's long strides down the sidewalk and into the street.

She wanted to scream, but the people here knew Cruise, they feared him, they gave in to his wishes. Her screams, she realized, would do her no good in this place.

"Who were you calling?"

"Cruise, I want to go home. I never should have run away from home, I know that now. I don't want to be on my own. I was just being a stupid rebellious kid."

"Yes, you do want to be on your own. You left home and you aren't going back. Once you leave home, it's forever. Now. Who were you calling?"

"My father."

"What did you tell him?"

Before she could stop her tongue, she had told the truth. "He didn't answer." As soon as she said it she knew it was a mistake. She should have lied and said she told him where she was and with whom.
Damn it to hell. How much more stupid could she get? One wrong turn after another.

"That's good," Cruise said. "You don't need your daddy. You've got me."

A1l the way to the hotel Molly tried to soothe Cruise's anger. It seethed beneath the surface and deepened the tone of his voice. It made him abrupt with her, jerking her over curbstones, up stairs, into the waiting elevator. Nothing she said was working.

"I didn't want to have to do this, Molly." He had her in her room and dropped her into the chair.

"Do what?" Punish her?

"Tie you up during my sleep time." He stooped to the floor and picked up nylon lengths of rope.

"Where'd you get those?"

"As soon as you left this room I brought them here."

"You're going to tie me to the chair?"

"It's all your fault." He tied her ankles first, kneeling, head bowed. Sunlight came through the windows and lit his brown and silver hair with a halo of gold. She stared at his hair, at the back of his head. She knew he had a knife there. It was unbelievable, but she'd seen him take it from his hair.

Molly wouldn't cry. Not in front of him. Not in front of a crazy man. She wouldn't fight him either, not now when she hadn't any chance of escape. She'd give in. She'd endure.

"I'm disappointed that you lied to me. Everything would have been all right if you hadn't lied," he said, tying her hands in her lap, then looping the rope through the arms of the chair.

He made her secure in the chair and then he lay down on her bed. He covered his face with a pillow, sighed into it, and soon was still.

That's when Molly cried just as quietly as she could while wondering what was to become of her.

#

In El Paso, Mark Killany found a Budget Inn just off the freeway and inside the city limits. The queerest feeling had dogged him for hours. He felt Molly was in some sort of distress. It was nuts because he'd never heard of a father being so close to his daughter that he had premonitions about her. Mothers, yes. Women were born with built-in radar. Especially when it came to their kids--knew when they had fallen and scraped a knee, knew when their diapers were wet, later on could read their feelings the way a blind man lays his hands on a face and reads the contours he finds. But fathers didn't talk about those things, never admitted to them, wouldn't have known what to think had they ever experienced them. Yet here he was with this gnawing in his gut. The worry spread out like a cancer taking over his body.

He couldn't sleep. Exhaustion rode him so hard he could hardly walk, but he couldn't get to sleep. He tossed, turned, got up for a glass of tap water from the sink in one of those flimsy plastic glasses. Lukewarm. Metallic tasting. He had forgotten to fill the ice bucket.

He turned on the lights and paced around the room making a path from the dressing table past the beds to the door and back again. Circling. Worrying.

Maybe he should get back on the road. Maybe he shouldn't He did need sleep. Didn't want to fall asleep behind the wheel and take out a young family with a bunch of kids sleeping in the back seat.

Nothing could be done about the premonition except live with it. He wished he had someone to talk to. Anyone. The agitation was unbearable. He dressed, grabbed the room key, and left for the motel restaurant. El Paso was lit up like the White House Christmas tree. He couldn't see the star cover overhead for all the lights in the city. People didn't sleep much here. The coffee shop was crowded. He chose a booth and drank coffee. He watched the entrance door. For what reason he didn't know. Molly wasn't going to walk in and plunk herself across from him. It wouldn't be that easy.
Might never see her again
. He had to squash that thought like an ant rolled between his thumb and forefinger.

A bum came in the door. Dirty chinos, ragged high top sneakers, the black kind basketball players used to wear when Mark was in high school. The bum wore two shirts over an undershirt. An orange-and-white-striped polo beneath a long-sleeved blue-and-purple plaid lightweight flannel rolled to the elbows. Hanging open. Belt too big, the tongue drooping down the front of the guy's fly. It looked as if it had been chewed by a big dog. Mark figured the man for a wino rather than a crackhead. Crackheads had the haunted look in their eyes that demanded instant fulfillment. They always looked so full of hunger they might eat a wriggling rat. Winos just looked beat and dejected.

Mari caught his eye. Motioned him over with a nod of his head to the seat across from him. The bum shuffled through the restaurant. He wiped the back of his not-too-clean right hand under his nose, slid into the booth, nodded back.

"Want something to eat?" Mark asked.

"I could do justice to a hamburger, man."

"Right."

The waitress took the order for burgers, fries, milk, and apple pie for dessert. The bum frowned when Mark asked for two milks, but the expression left as quickly as it had come. Free food was free food.

"You get around El Paso much?" Mark asked.

"Some. Got to stay on the move, man, you know how it is."

"I'm looking for my daughter. She's a runaway. You might've seen her. I know it's a slim chance, but I have to ask." Mark took out his wallet, slipped Molly's school picture from the plastic casing, pushed it across the table.

The bum looked at it hard. Then he shook his head.

"Nope. Would have remembered that hair. Never seen her."

Mark took the picture back and put away his wallet. A brief disappointment dimmed his eyes. He sighed audibly. "I don't know what I'm going to do.''

"Good kid?"

"The best. We just didn't see eye to eye."

"Old story, man."

"Yeah, I know. Must get boring hearing it."

"Mostly I hear it from the kids. Lot of them come through here on the way to Cali-forn-i-aye. Some of them never make it. Maybe I shouldn't have said that."

"I can imagine what happens to the ones who don't make it."

"You might imagine it, but the real thing's worse. Sometimes lots worse."

"I'm glad I'm buying your dinner. You're cheering me right the hell up."

"I'm sorry, man, I can see you're lost without that kid, and I don't mean nothing, but I got to speak the truth, don't I?"

The food came and the bum ate ravenously at the burger. Mark didn't think he took his eyes off the plate a second. He never stopped chewing until every crumb was

devoured.

"Here, finish mine." Mark pushed his half-eaten burger and fries across the table. "I don't have any communicable disease." The bum nodded his thanks and did away with the food in a few bites. He even downed the dreaded glass of milk.

"We get apple pie too?" he asked, a milk ring around his mouth.

"Sure. When's the last time you ate?"

"Oh, man, I don't need much. I don't get this hungry often. I eat enough."

Mark kept his comments to himself. He didn't know why, but he felt a lot better after feeding the guy. He thought he was against handouts to bums on general principle. On the general principle that they ought to go to work. But he knew now he didn't really believe that hard-line bullshit. This was a human being with a deadweight around his neck.

He needed charity. Hope. All those biblical commandments or whatever they were.

He signaled over their waitress and said they wanted the pie now. Two big slabs came spread out on huge saucers, slices of apple thick and long as Mark's thumb tumbling out of the flaky brown crust. He relished eating it just as much as his companion did. When they finished he ordered coffee for them.

"Man, that was the best damn meal I think I ever had. This place has got a good cook."

Mark smiled, felt himself relaxing from the inside out where that worry cancer had eaten at him.

"Sure wish I'd been some help about your girl. She's awful pretty."

"And awful young."

"Thirteen?"

"Just turned sixteen."

"That's a bad age, all right. I was out on my own at sixteen too. It ain't no kinda life, man."

"I was able to track her to a truck stop in Mobile, Alabama. Since then I can't get any breaks."

"You call the cops, report her as a runaway?"

"She hadn't been gone long enough. I got a lead from her friends and just lit out. I couldn't wait for the cops."

The bum nodded his agreement. "Mobile, eh? Truck stop. Why don't you try the Metro, man?"

"What's that?"

"Biggest truck stop in El Paso. Gets hundreds of trucks a night. Everybody stops in there. It's like a fuckin' shopping mall. She riding with a trucker?"

"No, some guy in a blue Chrysler. Picked her up in Mobile. Of course, she could be riding with someone else by now..."

"Well, hey, man, I'd try the Metro, I was you."

"Where is it?"

"Go back east on I-10 about three miles. Watch on your right off the freeway for a great big green Metro sign. You can't miss it, man."

"I'll do that, friend, thanks." Mark stood with the meal ticket.

The bum slid out of the booth after swallowing down the last of his coffee. He held out a grubby hand to Mark.